I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 16, 2011, the first installation in our exploration of the book of Mark. The text is Mark 1:9-20; read it here.
I think I’d like to revise something I said last week in my sermon. We celebrated Epiphany last week and read the story of the magi visiting Jesus in bethlehem, and I said to all of you that our spiritual lives are made up of waiting and following. Waiting for a sign, like the magi waited for that star to appear, and then following it, like the magi did, all the way to Bethlehem.
But I think I forgot something important. Because while much of our spiritual lives are indeed about waiting and following, there is also a very significant part of them that is about the wilderness.
The time after Christmas tends to be a difficult time for me. After all the meals and the friends and family and church and parties and food, things settle down, but they don’t seem to settle in. These last weeks have felt raw and choppy, lacking the sense of rhythm and momentum that I rely on to carry my life forward. Things don’t seem to fit together at the moment. All the pieces have jagged edges, and nothing’s lining up.
I spent most of this week recovering from having my wisdom teeth out on Monday, and then got a cold, and I was half working from home, half in the office, in a bit of a haze most of time, trying to balance a lot of things that didn’t want to stay balanced.
I’m also preparing for a course that I’m taking in January that’s called “Complicated Issues in Loss, Grief, and Dying.” So that’s...fun.
I’m reading a lot about death. Text books about death, and narratives about death, and case studies that my peers have written about pastoring people dealing with death. The case studies are effecting me in a much deeper way than I expected. They are painful stories, stories about things that I can’t even begin to imagine. Like loosing a child. Or living with a chronic terminal illness. Or of random, senseless violence, like six people, one of them just a child, gunned down outside a Safeway in Tucson by someone who seems to be very, very ill.
What logic can we find in tragedies such as these?
What sense?
And the age old questions slip from our mouths:
“Why has this happened?”
“For what purpose?”
“Why has this happened to me?”
They are questions that I have no answers for,
and I don’t think I’ll ever have answers for them.
And those questions have been overwhelming for me lately.
I’ve found myself in a place I’ve visited many times in my life,
a place where God seems very, very distant,
and I can’t remember how to pray.
It’s a place where the passages of the bible
remain flat on the page,
life seems less alive with hope and possibility,
and usual comforts seem hollow.
I’ve visited here before,
and I imagine that you have as well.
Sometimes we find our way here as if by mistake,
wander into the it for what seems like no reason at all.
Other times we’re dropped here by circumstance:
death, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship,
addiction or disease or mental illness.
No matter how we got here,
or how long we’ll stay this time around,
it’s a place that’s populated by a lot of questions that don’t have answers.
This place is called Wilderness.
Jesus spent some time here,
and perhaps that, in and of itself, may be a comfort to us.
Forty days is a long time to spend with Satan. Perhaps Jesus knew of the angels present with him, or perhaps he didn’t, but it’s remarkable to note that this time in the wilderness seems to occur almost as a result of Jesus’ baptism by the Spirit. The heavens tear open and God speaks, and then he’s alone again, just him and Satan and the wild beasts for more than a month.
And then it’s over,
and he walks along the sea
and says to two fisherman,
Come and follow me.
It’s striking that Jesus’ time alone in the wilderness is followed so closely by the call of these first four companions. From here on out, Jesus is very rarely alone. His ministry takes place in the midst of a growing community. It’s not until the conclusion of this gospel that we find him alone once more, crying out that even God has forsaken him. But even then, a group of women stand with him, apart from the crowd, but present, none the less.
I don’t know what to say about the wilderness, except that,
though there are these times of absence, excruciating times,
there are also times of presence.
One does not outweigh the other,
one does not win and the other loose.
It is simply the truth.
There is a time for both.
I don’t think it’s a puzzle to solve
so much as a space to inhabit,
a rhythm to somehow find peace with.
It helps me to remember that wherever you might be,
whatever wilderness you may be wandering in,
Jesus went there too.
There will be days,
perhaps months or years
of a heart that feels empty,
and then from nowhere
a sudden feeling of fullness.
It’s there in the way the clear light
lands on the bright snow, packed down hard in the dog park,
where a smiling husky
stands attentive and pure,
and someone smiles at you for no reason,
as they struggle to light their cigarette.
There will be days,
months,
perhaps years,
of a heart that feels empty,
and then from nowhere,
the cry of gulls and the smell of salt by the sea,
two fisherman casting their net
whose eyes catch yours
and decide,
in a moment of grace,
to follow.
Comments